Colin Charles Agenda

If anyone’s missed these excellent posts, I should really point them out.

• Chris DiBona tells us all that the moral is “Don’t Talk. Do. Don’t yammer. Launch. Release. Ship.” He’s right. Look at Microsoft talking about freeing their database, and wanting to release their beloved FoxPro code to the world, via CodePlex. Open source or not, they surely received a lot of positive karma last week. I don’t doubt their delivery aspect of things, but why talk about it before it happens - it means a lot more, doing it first, I’d think. With the possiblity of users expanding on this, maybe someone will work on a FoxPro to MySQL migration suite, that will be feature complete?
• Then Jeremy Zawodny tells us about how silly lame announcements are (really, they are) and we should Shut Up and Ship! Action does speak louder than words. And PR time is cheap, as chips. Talking about future delivery is embarassing (of course, the shit really his the fan when you don’t even deliver, eventually). Most interesting quote: “The(y) feel like the sort of thing you’d get from a politician during an
  election year, not a company (or group of companies) hell bent on
  delivering something truly amazing and innovative.“

How does this relate to the community around your company/product? In a bad way, quite clearly. The open source way has always been to find an itch, scratch it, release something, then talk about it. Nowadays, it seems that people rather talk about an idea, become itchy with the publicty, attempt to scratch it, and by the time its out to ship, initial interest has already fizzled out.

Steve Jobs is right when he says “real artists ship”. The way Apple release products? Create in secrecy (itch, scratch), release with a big bang (release, then PR), get cult following (seems to work recetly, pretty well).

Its April 01 2007 today. Happy April Fool’s? Happy Birthday Apple - a long 31 years it has been.

Dear Interweb,

A tiny issue plagues me. With everyone’s favourite Linux distribution of choice, Ubuntu. I’m looking at the Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Beta and for the life of me, can’t decide which to install on a Core 2 Duo machine (this was no better with Ubuntu 6.10 - and I’ve got both the amd64 and i386 ISOs sitting here). Its not AMD64, and its not 32-bit, so what are my choices? Referencing a post with regards to System76 support, it looks like I might have to go with a 32-bit install disc?

If I do have to go with the 32-bit install disc, why is that so? I mean, with Fedora, I’m quite happily running x86_64.

Kudos to the wiki documentation on Core 2 Duo Support, though maybe its a little dated. This is a very important question to answer, because I can imagine a lot of new laptops are actually, Core 2 Duo based (as probably are a lot of new desktops).

Also, a little bit of disappointment, but Ubuntu 7.04 has support for SPARC and not PowerPC. In a time when it might be opportune for third-world countries to start having Ubuntu-running Macs on their desktop…

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, core 2 duo, feisty fawn, edgy eft, powerpc

Update: I have concluded that the 64-bit Feisty Fawn is good for a Core 2 Duo. Read, Today I am a virgin and see how I solve my 32-bit application requirement problems, in Skype on 64-bit Ubuntu Feisty Fawn via i386 chroot (and Gizmo Project too).

Thats right, web logs are clearly gaining popularity in old media. I was reading the newspaper, and watching some television earlier, and to my shock, have just been bombarded with information about websites and the logs that people keep.

Of interest would be related to the Moorabbin police murders, that happened back in 1998. The news on every channel has brought up the topic of Jason Roberts “web of lies” (tomorrow’s newspaper, today!). He’s got a website, with some journal entries of his prison life up on the Internet. He tends to mention that he’s innocent, has his postal address, and a bunch of poems as well as pictures available for the public to read. Whats really interesting is that his website isn’t searchable via Google (or any other major search engine that I tried), but I found it at a most interesting place - Wikipedia!

An excerpt from the latest Wikipedia history

Clearly the anonymous benefactor of the URL to Wikipedia is a Telstra customer (or on a Telstra owned IP block). If the counter is working, I am visitor number 297. I wonder what these numbers will grow to, with curious onlookers searching for the website later today, and probably tomorrow when it hits mainstream dead tree newspapers.

Then, in today’s Age, The Barbados Butterfly (archived via the Wayback Machine), an anonymous blog, setup by a surgeon, Jillian Tomlinson, has now become invite-only, and she’s been suspended for a week from The Alfred Hospital. The blog contained very little identifying details, and Jillian mentions she wanted to use the blog for teaching medical students to identify ailments from pictures posted. She believes that the blog helped her reflect on her job. From taking a cursory look at the archives, it does seem like it was completely a personal blog, with some meme’s posted as well. There is also a lengthy blogroll of other “doctor weblogs”.

Has any other doctor blogged about possibly confidential information (after all, what you say to a doctor is private and confidential) and been given the sack or a suspension? Does the act of blogging about your work violate medical ethics?

This wouldn’t be the first time someone is being suspended over a blog entry, or a web log in general. Will we be seeing a rise in people getting into trouble over their blog entries, based on violating corporate secrets, ethics, or just plain venting?

Technorati Tags: weblog, blog, jason roberts, web of lies, journal entries, prison life, wikipedia, barbados butterfly, jillian tomlinson, alfred hospital, blog from a doctor, medical ethics, melbourne, australia

Its definitely interesting to see how old media (print - newspapers, magazines, periodicals) are being replaced with new media (blogs, website, RSS feeds), as a trend recently.

Via Zack Urlocker, Infoworld is heading the way of the dodo, in print. They’re moving to a web only publication. So they’re not dying, they’re just reinventing themselves in this connected age - via a web browser or an increasingly popular RSS reader. Steve Fox, Editor in Chief states: “Online bookmarks may be more efficient, site
searches retrieve information faster, but it’s hard to beat a magazine
for its tactility and visceral thrill.” And he’s right - a magazine is something you can pick up at the newsagent, read it on the train, rip articles out, and leave the rest of the magazine for someone else.

Jeff Ooi, mentions PC Magazine Malaysia is going the way of the dodo - completely. They have opted to not even have a website, for their content. That was a magazine that cost less than RM10 per month (two meals at the mamak? Ten teh tariks?), yet they couldn’t provide the value necessary to keep the readers going. It is a safe assumption that most readers prefer to get their IT information fix, via online means (here come the Slashdot, Digg, and various online news sources like News.com, Computerworld, etc.). Besides being free (cost of bandwidth, implied), and ad-supported (most probably blocked via AdBlock Plus or similar), the only real inconvenience is not being able to carry the magazine with you.

However, increased portability of PDAs, the capability of phones to read PDF files, or even subscribe to RSS feeds and get them updated over the wire (via 3G, or WiFi) will make all this paper magazine loss, a thing of the past. What really seems to be lacking, is good syncing software. I like to read my RSS feeds anywhere possible, and more importantly, have them correctly synced - between my Linux Liferea, Mac OS X NetNewsWire, and if possible via a web browser. You’re telling me to go look at Google Reader right now - but it lacks one important feature, that is the ability to work offline.

Another thing is how magazines are read. I like to flip through, rip out important articles, and save them, while not actually keeping the entire magazine. How does that work with the online world? NetNewsWire allows me to flag important articles, I could add them to del.icio.us as I see fit, but only the former will allow true searching (but tie me to my Mac). Duplicate feed entries are also a problem - this might be less of a problem with magazines per se, as their feeds tend not to end up on Planet agregators (though some do), but why hasn’t someone implemented a good feed reader with a sensible database backend that removes duplicate posts?

Ideally, a solution to all this will be a feed reader that was database backed, removed duplicate posts smartly, allowed marking articles for saving and easy exporting, killer search through saved articles, the ability to highlight within saved articles, worked in a web browser but with the abilty to work offline. I wonder if Google will come up with an elegant solution, using some of the offline AJAX features found in Zimbra Desktop.

Technorati Tags: rss, magazines, web publication, rss readers, offline ajax, duplicate removal

In this month’s PDN, Paul Buckley, vice-president executive art director at Penguin books, states: “When he’s using stock, he tends to go first to Photoeye and Flickr.” I wonder if they uphold the Creative Commons licensing.

I’ve posted some sets and new photos in general:

• Sng & Susan’s Wedding & Reception in Malaysia. You might find the Getting Married collection to be useful, as it chronicles their pre-wedding photography as well.
• One Buck Short at Jam Asia’s re-opening
• My annual Christmas Party 2006. Some interesting OLPC photos are there too.
• Arthur’s Birthday BBQ

Technorati Tags: photography, wedding, one buck short, concert, christmas, birthday, bbq

Its interesting to note some happenings in the MySQL world of late, that might be of interest to people in the database world, and those following open source software development and business models.

40% of developers say they use MySQL, according to the Evans Data Group. This is not including pilot projects, but real production use in corporate environments. A lot of MySQL’s popularity is generally attributed to the LAMP stack, though I see a change. Look at all the Ruby on Rails projects out there. They most definitely run on a MySQL backend. A good example are the products from 37signals, makers of the rather new, and cool tool, Highrise - they’re Ruby on Rails, and MySQL powered.

Is this 40% statistic prevelant to customers moving away from closed-sourced databases, or the traditional behemoths? I’m not privy to say (in fact, I generally don’t know how many migrations to MySQL there are), but I’m of the understanding that MySQL is probably hitting new markets, with all these web-based companies these days (ahem, Web 2.0 if you must). There are probably a large amount of migrations, but not significant enough to be a whopping large portion of the 40%.

Then, via James Governor: MySQL signs its first ever $1m+ deal. Keywords to take away include European telco, EUR$1m+, and helping the IPO momentum. This is obviously not something that there have been press releases about (yet?), but its great news, especially since its the first ever. This clearly gives the database some real bragging rights, I think. While MySQL’s planned IPO is not the first OSS IPO, its been quite a while since we last had one. Probably first open source database to IPO. And now, with a very large customer, this clearly rocks!

Technorati Tags: mysql, developers, production, lamp, ruby, RoR, ruby on rails, $1 million, million dollar, million dollar deal, european telco, IPO

Zimbra is truly the answer to the open source mail+calendering+contact management application. I have been playing around, and more recently using in production, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and all I can say is that it’s darn impressive.

While evaluating, I was always worried about the upgrade process - it seemed like pain for some software you run out of an ./install.sh script, that has its own versions of a web server, LDAP, database, and so on. In fact, reading the Single Server installation guide states:

Important. You cannot have any other web server, database, LDAP, or MTA server running, when you install the Zimbra software. If you have installed any of the applications, before you install Zimbra software, disable these applications.

However, this is fully configurable during the setup process - run it at another port besides port 80, and you’ve got the usage of Apache again. This might I add, even works for upgrades - it saves the configuration rather sensibly. It doesn’t recognize CentOS officially, and that might be something they should fix in the Community edition. A Zimbra appliance (on Ubuntu Server?) might be really cool - think about the possibilities of collaboration in a box.

As with anything, there are complaints. No live backup, unless you buy the Network edition? Though the promising thread means that people are interested in prodding this further (I know, I am). Backups are horrendous - stop the server, copy /opt/zimbra, then restart. /opt/zimbra is large. mailx seems to not be so sensible in working, any longer, which means logwatch doesn’t get emails out to the root user.

Today, I also decided to give Zimbra Desktop a twirl. They have installers for Windows, OS X and Linux. It installed fine on Fedora Core 6 (i.e. for its java requirements, gcj must’ve sufficed. UPDATE: They have their own, shipped, JRE.). At version 0.36, upon asking it to start, it does ask for the location of my web browser, which seems a little daft. When I send it to the path that Firefox has, it automatically shuts the installer down, making me think it might have crashed (actually, moving to the workspace with Firefox installed, shows that the desktop account manager configuration has started!). Lo and behold, at localhost:7633, Zimbra starts syncing everything and I’ve got my mail locally! I don’t need to use Thunderbird for mail, or Evolution for calendering - the Zimbra Desktop just brings it all right to me, in my browser, even when I’m offline.

The Zimbra Desktop is your exact Zimbra online experience, delivered to you offline. It performs a sync at 60 seconds by default, and you get the full experience of the client, in your web browser. Cross browser, cross platform, similarity. They mention they’ve not got a price yet for this, but if I were them, I’d not charge for it - the client, really, needs to be free for mass adoption (and of course work with the Community and Network Editions). Of course, the differentiation can come from things like attachment searches/HTML rendering, rebranding, support, and so forth. But email in your web browser that syncs with the online server, that in itself should be free - no crippling necessary.

Technorati Tags: zimbra, zimbra desktop, zimbra collaboration suite, zcs, backup

Here comes a combined rant, from the random tabs opened in Firefox, about Malaysia.

Bloggers and the law
A Barisan National representative has mentioned that the same laws apply to those of newspapers and journals, even in the cyber world. I do agree that slander and libel should be avoided on the Internet, and getting sued for that, is probably sensible. However, censorship like in printed media, should be avoided (and as far as I remember, the MSC promise was that there will be no censorship of the Internet). I’ve been silent about the Jeff Ooi/Rocky case, because plagiarism is not something that is easily proven. Did Jeff and Rocky incorrectly slander Brendan?

The New Economic Policy
I don’t consider the NEP new, because its been around for over thirty years. Malaysia is probably the only nation that helps the majority, to become incompetent. Yes, maybe that is a strong word, but there’s no real other description for it - housing discounts, education preference, job discrimination, sleeping partners, gains without merit and the list goes on. However, there are calls within UMNO to get rid of the NEP, which is excellent. Tun Musa Hitam states that “there was a need to have a change in mindset to draw investors to the country.” No interests in cronyism, nepotism, the NEP. Yes! I quote the article, again:

In the last few decades of the NEP, the country used to have an Ali Baba way of doing business where Ali would give his name and Baba would do all the work.  

“As time went on, Ali and Baba became equal and Ali was able to deliver as much as Baba. Now, there are even Alis who are using the Babas not as sleeping partners but as equals,” he quipped.

Will we see change soon? Will people in Malaysia be recognized on merit? Not by their race, the strings that they can pull, and so forth? One can only hope, or succumb to the brain drain that is already happening.

Copycats
What is with Malaysia? A long time ago, there was a Friendster spin-off, called Kawanster. Now, there’s a Digg clone? Aizat has a pretty good analysis of this. He asks if this is the best Malaysia can do - copying, or apeing other products? I’m beginning to wonder, myself.

WiMax
Malaysia should have rocking Internet access soon, I do hope. No more tied down to Streamyx, but WiMax access for everyone. The Star reports:

The four winners are REDTone-CNX Broadband Sdn Bhd,
Packet One Networks (M) Sdn Bhd (formerly known as MIB Comm Sdn Bhd),
Asiaspace Dotcom Sdn Bhd and Bizsurf (M) Sdn Bhd (a unit of YTL-e
Solutions Bhd).

Those are the companies to be watching, when it comes to improving broadband in Malaysia.

Chevna
The Linux distribution du jour, for Malaysians? (yes, bandwidth limit exceeded now). These were the TrianceOS folk, now selling Ubuntu for between RM39.95-49.95. From what I gather, they use Ubuntu mainstream repositories, add to sources.list a few more repositories (like mediaubuntu, beryl, wine, etc.), and they also have a Chevna repository at http://www.chevna.com/chevna. Is this an act we should support? I mean, Ubuntu + a sources.list that’s sexy, isn’t something that I think is worth much. But lifetime e-support? For RM50? I believe they’re going to encounter problems - even basing it off an LTS release, it probably doesn’t make sense to support something for life. And what about hardware issues?

It remains to be seen what they gather over just selling support for Ubuntu per se (I’d say, RM50/year, for Ubuntu support might make sense). And the next LTS release from Ubuntu, will send out free media. If anyone has tried Chevna yet, please do post your comments - I’m interested in giving it a twirl, the moment they fix their bandwidth issues.

Technorati Tags: malaysia, bloggers, law, new economic policy, nep, copycats, digg, wimax, chevna, ubuntu, linux, distribution, politics